By Marian Spencer and Christopher SmithermanPublished October 21st 2008 in Cincinnati Herald

On Election Day, we hope you will join us in voting for Issue 8, to
restore Proportional Representation (PR) for Cincinnati City Council
elections. When the City Council was elected by proportional
representation, African Americans won seats for the first time, and the
Council reflected African American voting strength far more fairly than
today. In fact, in two PR elections as many African Americans won seats
as now serve on our City Council -- even though the African American
share of Cincinnati's population in those PR elections was barely a
third of what it is today. And it was proportional representation that
was essential to Barack Obama's victory in the presidential nomination
contest this year.

Fair representation of our community is only one of several good
reasons to bring back PR. Issue 8 will make our politics more positive
and our politicians more responsive to us. Every vote will be counted,
and every voter's power will be maximized.

Proportional representation will allow real change in our city as well.
By reducing the number of votes for what it takes a candidate with
strong community support to win, Issue 8 makes it much easier for new
candidates to win without having high name recognition gained from
incumbency or big money politics. Issue 8 also will make it much easier
to cast a smart ballot -- you'll never vote against your interests, as
can too easily happen in our current 9x system.

Unfortunately, Councilman Jeff Berding, Issue 8's leading opponent, has
been repeatedly giving inaccurate information about how PR works even
though we used it so well for 30 years. First, what you do as a voter
is simple. You indicate who your first choice is. You then indicate
your second choice, your third choice and so on. You can rank as many
candidates as you want up to nine because ranking a lower choice never
counts against your favorite choice -- unlike in the current system.
Studies of cities with ranked choice voting systems show that voters
like being able to rank their candidates and find it easy to do.

Getting fair results is simple too. Suppose five candidates are running
with strong support in the African American community. If more than
half of voters citywide rank those five candidates in any order before
they rank any other candidate, those five candidates are guaranteed to
win. If more than 40% of voters rank those same five candidates before
any other candidate, four of them will win. If more than 30% of voters
rank those same five candidates before anyone else, three of them will
win -- guaranteed.

It's that simple. That's why Issue 8 is called proportional
representation. Like-minded voters elect candidates in proportion to
their support in the community.

Proportional representation played a big role in this year's
presidential primaries. Indeed without the use of PR, Sen. Barack Obama
would not have become the first African American to win a major party
nomination.

Take the Iowa caucuses, which vaulted Sen. Obama to the front of the
pack. Those caucuses are a great example of how Issue 8 will work next
year. Sen. Obama and other candidates earned convention delegates at
each Iowa caucus in proportion to their share of support among caucus
voters. After gathering in person, backers went to a different part of
the room designated for each candidate running at the time. Every vote
was then counted.

Under winner-take-all rules, like Cincinnati's current 9x city council
system and like what the Republicans used in most of their primaries,
the candidate with the most votes would win every delegate. But in
Iowa's Democratic caucuses, a candidate would win delegates if they won
a certain percentage of support -- in most caucuses that share was 15%.
Several candidates were often below that level of support, however, so
supporters of those candidates had to decide where to move to help
their next choice win delegates. Most chose to move to their second
choice. In the end, almost every Iowa Democrat helped a candidate win
delegates.

In Iowa, Sen. Obama was a popular second choice of supporters of other
candidates, which helped him gain a bigger victory than expected. As
the Democrats went onto more primaries, they continued to elect
convention delegates according to the principle of proportional
representation rather than 9x-type winner-take-all rules. When Sen.
Hillary Clinton finished first in big states like Ohio, California,
Pennsylvania and New York, she won more delegates than Sen. Obama -- but
only her fair share.

If the Democratic candidates' state-by-state vote totals had been the
same and if 9x-type, winner-take-all rules had been used statewide, as
was the case in most Republican primaries, Sen. Clinton would have won
the nomination easily because of her narrow wins in big sates. But that
would have been an unfair result because Sen. Obama won more votes
around the country. Proportional representation made all those votes
count.

Returning to Cincinnati, voters of course won't have to participate in
a caucus. They can just head to the voting booth and rank candidates in
order of choice. Just like in the Iowa caucuses, if a voter's first
choice doesn't get the number of votes needed to win a seat, his or her
vote is then counted for their second choice.

We wanted to address two specific points where Councilman Berding has been misleading the public.

First, Councilman Berding has falsely said we cannot count the ballots
next year after passing Issue 8. In fact, many cities around the
country have passed ranked choice voting systems in recent years --
including big cities like Oakland, Minneapolis and San Francisco -- and
have shown how Cincinnati can get the count done.

Consider Cary, North Carolina, a city of 115,000 people outside
Raleigh. Four months after approving a change to a ranked choice voting
system, all first choices were counted at the polls with the voting
equipment the County already had. Ballots were then collected centrally
and counted by hand. Issue 8 will give the city an additional option of
using inexpensive optical scan equipment to count ballots centrally --
just as the City of Takoma Park, Maryland did after adopting a ranked
choice voting system.

Second, Congressman Berding has falsely said that the order of how
ballots are counted can be manipulated in a way that might change the
results. Recall that we already made it clear how if more than 50% of
Cincinnati voters ranked five or more candidates in any order ahead of
other candidates, those five candidates are sure to win. The way that
can happen is that PR ensures we don't 'waste' votes either on people
certain to lose or people who have more votes than needed to win.

When a candidate loses in a PR election, supporters of that candidate
have all their votes move to their next choice among candidates still
in the running for the remaining seats -- just like in the Iowa
caucuses. That's simple and avoids those votes being 'wasted' on a sure
loser.

When a candidate wins with PR and has more votes than needed, we also
want to make sure those votes aren't wasted. Here's how you do it, just
as it was done when PR was used in our city in the past and as it's
done today in Cambridge, Massachusetts. 1) Every ballot is first
counted for the candidate listed first on that ballot. Ballots are
tallied in order of neighborhood. 2) A candidate's first choices are
numbered in the order that the candidate receives them. 3) If that
candidate wins and receives more votes than necessary to win, those
extra votes are distributed to the second choice on each ballot.
Ballots moving to second choices are distributed evenly, reflecting
where that candidate earned support. If a very popular candidate won
twice as many votes as necessary, every other ballot cast for that
candidate in every neighborhood would be counted for each voter's next
choice. There's no way to 'manipulate' this process.

The Democratic Party has chosen to use a form of PR in their primary
election because they want the delegates to be a fair reflection of
Democratic voters. The bottom line for Cincinnati is that Issue 8 will
give all of us fair representation and a chance for fresh voices to
improve our city with their ideas. That's why such leaders as
Representative Tyrone Yates, former mayor Bobbie Sterne and former
governor John Gilligan have joined groups like Common Cause, the
Cincinnati NAACP, Charter Committee and Ohio Citizen Action in
supporting Issue 8. We need change in Washington. D.C., to be sure, but
change begins at home. Please join us in voting "yes" on Issue 8 on
November 4th.

(Christopher Smitherman is President of the Cincinnati NAACP. Marian
Spencer is a former President of the Cincinnati NAACP and former
Vice-Mayor of Cincinnati.)